


Best Friends Forever

by Katzensprung



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Crushes, F/F, Female Harry Potter, Female Tom Riddle, Gen, Girl-Who-Lived (Harry Potter), Harry Potter Has a Saving People Thing, Harry Potter is a Mess, Hogwarts Chamber of Secrets, Horcruxes, One-Sided Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Pre-Slash, Temptation, Tom Riddle's Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:07:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29933862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katzensprung/pseuds/Katzensprung
Summary: Harry Potter finds a lost diary and makes friends with Tom Riddle, an orphan girl just like her. Everything would be great if only the petrifications would stop. Oneshot.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 12
Kudos: 59





	Best Friends Forever

**Author's Note:**

> I've played around with everyone's ages a bit (switching second and third years) since it feels more realistic for a 13 year old to have more in common to write about with a 15 year old than a 12 vs 16 year old.

Water was gushing everywhere.

In the middle of the toilet was a small black book with a tiny brass lock on the side. Harry really didn’t want to touch it. It looked soggy and was probably all sorts of gross now even though the toilet looked clean. A haunted toilet even! Harry didn’t even know how many times worse that made it.

But she shouldn’t just leave it there. Harry had never had a diary before, but she knew that they were important. Sacred even. Whoever was missing it would want it back. This whole thing was probably a mean prank.

* * *

She really didn’t mean to open it. It had been an accident.

To be honest, she wasn’t even sure how she did it. Hermione had tried, after they couldn’t find a student named Tom Riddle. The lock wouldn’t budge no matter what spells hit it.

Then later on the ink had spilled everywhere in her bag and the diary just clicked open like nothing.

* * *

A diary that could write back on its own. Magic was brilliant.

Tom was perfect. She was everything that Harry wanted to be someday. And she even had a boy name too! "My mother thought I was going to be a boy and didn't live long enough to notice," she had said.

Only she hated her ("too muggle and common," she wrote) name normally, but she said Harry could call her it.

“We’re best friends after all,” she had even said. Harry thought she would burst from happiness.

Tom understood, too, in ways that Hermione tried but just couldn’t. Hermione never went hungry or knew how comforting a small dark space could be. Harry knew she could tell Tom all the things that no one else could ever know.

* * *

Ginny was on the ground, her red hair spreading out around her like an angel's halo. It looked duller somehow though and her skin almost grey. She looked more like a mannequin than a girl.

Her body was so small against the vastness of the chamber, lit only by green flames in intervals along the walls.

Harry dropped next her in a jumble, sliding slightly on the damp and muck. She ran her hands along Ginny’s neck, trying to find her pulse like in the movies. Her skin felt cool against Harry’s hands and the wrongness of it made Harry feel sick.

In the corner of her eye, a black blur moved out of the shadows. Harry could have cried in relief. She didn’t know how Tom got here, but at least now she wasn’t alone. Tom was so clever. They could figure out a way to move Ginny before the basilisk even realized they were here.

Or maybe not. Tom looked like herself, mostly. Her black hair fell in big waves to just underneath her chin, curling up at the ends in ways that Harry was pretty sure was actually magic but Tom had laughed and claimed was muggle rollers. Her uniform was tidy and perfectly in place as always. But her edges were slightly blurry and out of focus, her colors faded like an old photograph left out in the sun. Can diary ghosts move people?

“She won’t wake,” Tom said.

“Tom!” Harry called out. “I’m so glad you’re here. You’ve got to help me. We have to get out of here. I know it sounds crazy, but there’s a basilisk. I don’t know where it is, but it could be along any moment.”

“Oh my sweet girl. You haven’t figured it out yet, have you? She won’t come unless she’s called,” Tom said. Her face quirked into a half smile.

The chamber was quiet; the distant drops of water sounded like thunder.

“Why are you setting a giant snake on everyone?” Harry blurted out when the silence felt too long. She had to say something.

“I had to get your attention some way. You’re all little Ginny talks about, you know. It was rather boring at first to listen to while waiting as Ginny poured more and more of herself into me. Her very soul for mine. But then you were so _interesting_. Wonderful Harriet Potter, the hero of wizarding Britain. So pretty. So brave, so kind,” Tom continued on, letting the last word sound like dirt beneath her feet. “You’re like a fairy tale princess to her. She didn’t know if she wanted to be your friend or to simply be you. I think she may even be in love with you.”

Harry was pretty sure she meant to say a word just then, but all that came out was an embarrassing squeak.

“Maybe you’re a bit too young for that,” Tom laughed and then winked.

She had winked. Harry wanted to die. Everything was going completely wrong and somehow it was getting even worse.

“But do you know what happens to princesses, my dear Harry? They meet dragons and get devoured.”

“You’re very pretty for a dragon. I think they’re supposed to be much scalier.” Merlin, what was she even saying? She was supposed to be buying time until she could figure out what to do. And she was pretty sure that she hadn’t meant to say that of all things.

Tom -No, not Tom. Riddle. You can't just casually threaten people and still be on a first name basis. Actually, that was very Tom now that Harry thought about it.- smiled and it was maybe even genuine. The sight of it made Harry feel sick again.

“I had to see this girl who defeated the greatest dark lord ever…imagine my surprise at finding you. A stringy haired, knobby kneed, thirteen-year-old who knew barely anything about magic. Completely average at best. You may have raw talent, certainly, that could turn into something if given enough time and training. But to defeat Lord Voldemort?”

“Why do you even care?”

Fire erupted from the wand –Harry’s wand, she thought faintly– in Riddle’s hand. With each new letter being traced out, it felt like the world was ending.

Riddle was still pale, but less so than even a few minutes ago. Ginny was clearly running out of time and Harry didn’t know how to fix things.

“You could join me,” Riddle said softly, stepping closer, “We’re alike in so many ways. I would prefer not to kill you, but—"

“Oh you would _prefer_ it,” Harry sputtered.

“But I will if I have to,” she finished firmly. Her nose briefly scrunched up in irritation at having been interrupted, but everything smoothed out into a bright smile as she continued, “After all, what are best friends for?”

She was close enough now that their noses could almost touch. Harry thought she might have felt a faint breath against her cheek and that had to be a very bad sign but at that moment Harry wasn’t even sure she was capable of breathing anymore herself much less Riddle.

Riddle was just as beautiful in the dimly lit chamber as in the diary. The unearthly green of the flames reflected off her black hair, shiny and soft looking. Her lips were glossy like the girls staring from magazine covers at grocery checkout stands. Harry could never buy any. Aunt Petunia would have thrown a fit if she had used even a cent of the grocery money on anything for herself. But she could stare and wish and wonder how anyone could manage to be so perfect.

Hermione had huffed and explained that it was all fake. Airbrushing or something like that even though Harry didn’t know what that meant exactly or how air could make you look like that? But now, looking at Riddle, she knew Hermione was wrong. People could really be that perfect.

But was Riddle a person anymore? She had been and she wanted to be again. And Harry wanted it too. She still twisted inside at the idea that Riddle had lied. It had been foolish of her to trust a talking diary of all things, but she had been so happy to have a friend. A best friend even, just like all the other girls, who could talk about anything together. They had spent nearly every night writing back and forth to each other.

No one deserved to be stuck in a book forever. Especially someone as brilliant as Riddle who burned so brightly and could feel at every moment the walls of her prison surrounding her. Fifteen for fifty years and so full of desperate anger that she will gladly destroy all that stands in her way. Harry didn’t know if everything was a lie or if only some things were, but Harry was still Tom's friend even if Tom wasn’t Harry’s.

But she couldn’t make Riddle alive again at the price of Ginny. Sure, Ginny was weird, and Harry didn’t even really know her other than as Ron’s shy little sister who peered at her from around corners. But Ginny was already a person and she couldn’t die at only 12 years old. And she was counting on Harry to save her.

Riddle was still twirling her wand, almost lazily. Mockingly. At some point she had stepped back and Harry could remember to breathe again. Riddle was still talking though and Harry desperately tried to pay attention, to make anything make sense.

“I know that you see it too. You can feel the injustice of it all and it burns so deep into your soul that you think you'll become an inferno. This world was supposed to be better. We are magic! We can do anything. Create anything. Be anything. We are better than muggles and living lives of boring drudgery.

But we’re still nothing here. Poor little orphans. They think us filth for our muggle blood and weak for being girls. Good for nothing more than marriage and maybe garden parties, if we’re of the right sort. They raise you up as their chosen one now, but you heard all the whispers this year. The moment you step out of line and do anything not expected of you, the whole wizarding world will turn on you. They would consume you. Crush you completely and destroy everything that makes you Harry until you are perfect and docile Harriet Potter, their toy doll to do with whatever they like. And afterward they will expect you to thank them for it.

Come with me, Harry, and we could reshape this world into what it should be. Together,” Riddle said as she tilted her head to stare into Harry’s eyes.

Had anything ever been so blue and bright? Riddle’s eyes felt like giant pools waiting for Harry to drown herself in.

And Harry wanted. More than she had ever wanted anything before. In some ways, Riddle was right. Harry desperately wished the wizarding world to be all that it promised on that first visit to Diagon Alley, but every year it grew more tarnished and the bitter disappointment curled around her heart. The corruption of the Ministry. Throwing innocent people like Sirius away without trials. Abandoning her with the Dursleys every year. The prejudices against muggleborns and non-humans.

She could say yes. They could be friends again, real friends and not just diary friends. They could sit in the sun together and exchange looks that contained all sorts of secret codes that only they knew and hold hands and she could hear Riddle’s laugh all the time--

\--And Ginny was lying in the damp, cold and alone, waiting for someone to save her.

Harry shook her head.

Riddle stared at her for a few seconds, before turning sharply towards the empty chamber and making a long hissing sound that Harry wished she couldn’t understand.

**Author's Note:**

> Harry is so deep into her crush and yet somehow still so oblivious. This story came about from thinking about how deeply important diaries can be for girls growing up as opposed to how boys are raised to view them. I was also wondering what life would mean for a poor girl in the 1940s, with everything in society stacked against her, and what sort of burning anger and ambition could turn her into a dark lord/lady.
> 
> This is my first fanfic, so please let me know if you see anything that needs correcting!


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